AuthZed Raises Series A Funding from General Catalyst
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, including my posts, you know that we usually talk about very technical concepts, in a way that we hope is approachable. Today, I want to talk about something completely different! The good news is that with this announcement, you’re guaranteed many technically interesting posts in the future!
Today, I’m proud to announce that AuthZed has secured $12 million of Series A fundraising! This is our first additional capital since our original Seed funding back in early 2021. Before I get into the details of the funding, I thought it might be fun to take a moment to reflect on how we got here.
Jimmy, Joey, and I started AuthZed to scratch our own itch. In our past lives, we built a product called Quay, the first private Docker registry. When it was time to add authorization to Quay, we did what everyone does: we quickly wrote some code to add a very basic role-based model to the product which allowed for point to point sharing of repositories between users.
That didn’t last us very long: we were quickly inundated with requests for organizations, teams, nested teams and namespaces, default permissions, and so on and so on. Every time we had to change the permissions model we were terrified. Permissions code is security critical by definition, and each time we took a stance on how the code should be written, we were proven wrong by the next request. There were actually features that we never shipped due to the difficulty of the required authorization changes. Additionally, our naive implementation was far from scalable: far too high a proportion of our underlying database’s CPU was spent on computing authorization.
